CityVille

» see zynga.com/games/cityville as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

by january 2011 cityville had a hundred million monthly active people. i was not one of them. the zynga games passed me by at the invite-spam layer of facebook, where neighbor requests piled up unread alongside the candy crush ones a few years later. in those days. by december '10 i was twenty-six, doing engineering work in ankara, and my facebook account was mostly turkish university friends posting nothing on a regular basis.

cityville launched on facebook on december 2 2010. zynga had farmville at scale already and was looking for the next vertical inside the same flash-canvas social-game model. the pitch was the city-builder loop. you cleared a plot, built houses, opened stores, hired workers from your facebook neighbors, watched coin tick up over time, came back every few hours to collect rent and harvest yields. by january 2 the game was at a hundred million monthly active users. on day fifty. larger than any application facebook had measured up to that point.

the celebrity and brand tie-ins are the part most people forgot about. mcdonald's branded restaurants and best buy storefronts you could drop in your downtown. lady gaga and michael jackson content drops aligned to album cycles. it was zynga at the moment of maximum confidence about how big this was going to get, with the cultural-product playbook of a network tv show grafted onto a free flash game.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the launch numbers were the cleanest evidence the social-game category had a real ceiling somewhere far above where it currently sat. cityville hit a million daily active people on day one. five million daily on day six. twenty million daily by the end of december. the growth curve was steeper than anything farmville had shown a year earlier, which had taken seven weeks to hit twenty million daily.

the academy of interactive arts and sciences gave it social networking game of the year at the 14th annual interactive achievement awards. zynga's ipo prospectus filed at the end of 2011 leaned hard on the cityville numbers as the evidence the company was a scalable business and not a one-hit farmville studio. the december 2011 ipo priced zynga at a $7 billion valuation, with cityville the second-biggest contributor to the topline next to texas holdem.

~ the cracks ~

the decline started inside six months. by mid-2011 the daily active number was sliding. by the end of 2011 it had dropped below fifty million monthly. the same retention curve that had powered the launch worked against the game on the back side, with players who had built up several months of city progress losing interest in the daily collection loop faster than zynga could ship new content.

cityville 2 was the response. zynga released it in november 2012 with isometric 3d art and a slightly heavier game design. it shut down in february 2013, three months after launch. the sequel's failure was the moment inside zynga where the category-leadership theory broke. if cityville at peak could not produce a sequel that lasted longer than a quarter, the formula did not scale forward.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part you had to be in the english-language facebook userbase for, and i was at the edge of it. cityville stayed nominally live through 2014 with a small remaining player base of regulars. zynga had stopped shipping major content updates by 2013. the april 30 2015 shutdown rolled cityville into the same sunset wave that closed frontierville, and the announcement listed it alongside half a dozen other zynga titles being retired the same day for the same flash-deprecation reason.

what closed with cityville was the proof-of-concept moment for the whole social-game category. for two months in early 2011 a flash canvas inside facebook had been the largest software application by daily users in the world. that ceiling never came back. the genre survived on mobile in a smaller shape, with candy crush and clash of clans inheriting the daily-loop habit but never the scale or the cultural moment. by 2026 the cityville domain redirected to zynga's corporate site and the only screenshots of the game live on archive.org and on a few wikipedia article photos.

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